The declassified record documents foreign influence operations in recent U.S. elections but no altered vote tally, a distinction that cuts against the president's 2020 claim and, applied evenly, against overreaching claims about Russia and 2016 alike.

How did the covert shaping of other nations' elections and governments become not an improvisation but a standing instrument of American statecraft, kept ready for use decade after decade?

Long before any government wrote it into law, the intuition was already there: that violence in war should be aimed at those who fight, not at those who do not.

To understand why an American constitutional amendment ratified in 1868 turns on the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof," one has to travel back more than two and a half centuries earlier, to a property dispute…

The American socialist impulse is older than the industrial working class it is now associated with, older than the strikes and party conventions that would come to define it, and, crucially, older than Karl Marx…

Every nation tells stories about itself, and in the United States a large share of those stories are told in institutions the federal government funds, charters, or owns outright.

The entire fight turns on a statute roughly one paragraph long, codified since a 2014 recodification at 54 U.S.C. 320301 to 320303, and before that at 16 U.S.C. 431 to 433 (nps.gov; law.cornell.edu).

Every discussion of a strained modern power grid, of heat waves that push transmission lines to their limits, begins with a decision made in the 1880s that almost no one alive remembers making.

The Espionage Act became law on June 15, 1917, just weeks after the United States entered World War I, and it passed at the urging of President Woodrow Wilson, who had been pressing Congress for such authority since…

For most of the American nineteenth century, a job in the federal government was not a career won by examination or held by right of competence.